Detecting abusers is a complex problem. Who is the real villain in the story? As a survivor of childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, I thought I had it all figured out. I knew who the villain was: The man my mother introduced into my life when I was five years old would destroy a part of me forever; a part of me that still dissolves into terror and tears when the wrong scent or turn of phrase causes a flashback from something that happened more than 35 years ago.
Practically from birth, I have been abused. My birth father whipped me with his belt when I was two and three years old. I remember him pulling his belt through the loops, folding it in half and snapping the leather together to frighten me when I had committed some transgression he felt worthy of a whipping. I remember he and my mother inspecting my bottom after one of those whippings for marks that might be noticeable if someone else saw them. He also made me hold wine vinegar in my mouth because I repeated a swear word I’d heard him say when I was 3.
These men abused me actively. They damaged me. I was also raped twice as a teenager.
But in my mind, the person whose abuse looms the largest, especially lately, is the abuse I suffered from my mother. She was there every time my father whipped me with a belt and did nothing to stop it. She watched as he forced the vinegar into my mouth, doing it twice when I couldn’t hold it the first time.
When I was five years old my mother moved in with the man who would abuse me for the next ten years . They also had a roommate. That roommate would sometimes tickle me. He would never stop, no matter how much I protested and begged, until I peed my pants. She never stopped him.
I told her multiple times about the sexual abuse I was suffering at the hands of her husband. She would always promise to “talk to him.” Never to make it stop, or take me away to safety, or anything else. She’d tell me that he had promised her he wouldn’t do it anymore. After nothing changed, I wondered if she ever really spoke to him.
In my younger years, we spent a lot of time moving around and living with other families, while I wore clothes that didn’t fit and pretended I was happy. Being bullied at school for being poor and a misfit was the happier place. Going home was horror. Most of my early teen years at home were spent cleaning the house. After supper it was my job daily to do the dishes, sweep the floor, and often bathe my three younger sisters (the oldest of whom is eight years younger than me). While I’d do this, I remember her sitting on the couch with him, smoking pot and snacking on chocolate chips.
When I was fifteen she was seeing a therapist for depression, and had told the therapist part of her problem was the friction between her husband and oldest daughter. I learned this when my mother brought me to her next appointment, when the therapist had asked n to hear my point of view about why there was friction between us. As we talked, the therapist wanted to know why I felt so much animosity toward the man. I looked at my mother, who seemed ambiguous. I took a deep breath and told the therapist about the abuse.
She looked at my mother and said, “You know I have to report this.” My mother just nodded and looked morose. The legal process began and I was free, or so I thought.
After the entire court process, her husband was sentenced to nine months in jail with daily work release for my ten years of abuse. I lived in a foster home for more than a year.
When I moved back home my senior year in high school, my mother told me (after he was released) that we were all moving together to Seattle. We lived in Wisconsin at the time. I refused to go. I would never live in a home with him again, and for some reason, she thought she’d find a way to circumnavigate the probation he’d been sentenced to that would prevent him from unsupervised contact with me or any other minors.
She signed papers so I could get married to my fiancé as an underaged minor, and she left with her husband and my three much-younger sisters.
It took me nearly 10 years to speak to her again. I reached out to her. I felt guilty and a need for a mother, even though I’d never been mothered by her. I was still living in Wisconsin and she was in Seattle. We communicated by telephone. Often she would call me, talking of her depression. Sometimes she would tell me she was thinking about killing herself and I would have to talk her down. She would tell me much it cheered her up and how I was the only one who could do that for her.
After several years, she was in financial trouble and needed to sell her house and start over. We drove out to Seattle, packed up her house into a trailer, and drove back to Wisconsin, where we had her live with us for several months. During that time she simply stayed around the house doing nothing until my husband finally insisted she apply for and take the first job she was offered, save up and move out by an established deadline.
Over the years while we lived in the same city, we saw each other frequently. It took me a long time to recognize a pattern. I am disabled from a lifetime of degeneration in my back, and have had several surgeries, including two spinal fusions. I also have brain cancer, and have had surgery to remove one tumor and have recurrent growth. This has caused short term memory damage and other mental disability.
My mother has repeatedly over the years complained of the exact physical maladies as I have “oh, but not to the same extent as you have, honey”. When she has gone to the doctor at my insistence, they can nothing wrong with her. Testing has proved out her memory is fine for her age. The tests she has taken, more than once, are the exact same tests that I am often given to test my neural function since my diagnosis of brain cancer and following surgery. They also tested her for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s just to be sure.
When we got together, she would tell me of her mental woes and physical troubles. She would ask me for my medical opinion often, since I had worked in the medical field for ten years before my cancer diagnosis. Once I told her that her dumping her troubles on me had to stop because stress causes seizures for me with my brain cancer, and she apologized. Next time I saw her she went right back to the same behavior.
Every visit felt like a struggle to constantly support her, even when she’d sometimes offer to do things. Those times felt like the pretending. For example, when we hosted a family holiday for both my side and my husband’s, when we all sat down at the table, she’d blurt out how wonderful everything was before anyone else had a chance to even taste anything or say a word.
Another thing I learned years after it happened involved my younger sister. My mother was dating a man in Seattle after her husband divorced her (she never would have left him), and that man was caught looking in my sister’s window while she was undressing. She continued to date him after she learned this happened. She “talked to him” about it.
I look back at the young child I was and I think about telling my mother what was happening to me, and how she would tell me she would “talk to him”. I look at how she behaves now, always acting like everything that wrong with me is something she has symptoms for. I see jealousy. I see envy. I see her wanting attention in a sick way, attention that we in the disability community call “inspiration porn.” And I think that she let him hurt me back then for all those years because she thought I somehow deserved it. Because she wasn’t getting that attention from him and he was giving (in her sick mind) attention to me, and she let it happen. Every kick in the butt I got in public to humiliate me, every punch I got when her husband found me wearing a bra in bed at night, might as well have come from her.
I know, deep in my heart, that I have resented her my entire life. That I have not loved her, and I have felt betrayed and I have not forgiven her and never will. Her abuse has been ongoing and she is not sorry for it because she continues the same behavior.
The complexity of her abuse is something I couldn’t see objectively until I finally moved away from her. But the relief I felt when I was free of her was palpable. To this day I recognize that I do not miss her. When she contacts me I lie and say I do miss and love her because it is what I have always done. I know now that I cannot continue. It is making me sick to do it. Every time my phone pings or buzzes or rings and I see it is her, I feel nausea and a pressure that I can no longer bear.
At last I know I must free myself. I have been afraid of the repercussions when it comes to my family; there are ripples that spread inevitably when you cut one person out of your life and you have a collection of mutual relationships. I can only hope they will understand. I understand if they don’t.
I can only do what is right for me.
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